Statuary offence

First they came for Basil Fawlty, next it will be Will Shakespeare. The BBC, in the craven way we are used to, has removed the funniest episode of Fawlty Rowers from its box set, the one where Basil, after a blow on the head, fails to get away with not mentioning the war. HBO has removed Gone With The Wind, not because it’s a bun fest of hackneyed plot and over-ripe acting, but because of the way it portrays black slaves. And don’t expect to see a blacked-up Olivier in Othello again. Anywhere.

Where does it end? There have been hundreds of white actors – from Brando to just about any Hollywood star you could name – who have adopted a different ethnicity. Almost every cowboy movie made had whites cherry-blossomed to play "Indians". Are they all to be scrapped? And books? Are they to be banned or burned? Rudyard Kipling, Huckleberry Finn. And what about Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess? No more Summertime?

This is all frivolous and irrelevant compared to the real issue of confronting racism and attempting to make amends.

I was only vaguely aware of Edward Colston until he rolled down the street in Bristol and plopped into the Avon – or at least his effigy did – and only then because a local rock band were boycotting the hall named after him.

The hall is to be renamed but once it’s the Massive Attack Arena, is that it? Will the band happily play there and punters flock back, comfy in the place the slave trader’s money paid for but now rebadged?

These protests may be necessary, but are they sufficient? Isn’t there just the faint whiff of hypocrisy over benefiting from the profits of murder and trafficking, as long as the shame isn’t named? Knock down Colston Hall? That may be the ultimate logic but it clearly isn’t going to happen. I doubt the names of the more than 80,000 slaves Colston traded were noted, or that their descendants can be traced. But reparations are due, not just airbrushing. Bristol owes.

Not just Bristol. Liverpool, Edinburgh and particularly Glasgow, many of whose finer buildings were built on the enslavement of others. I’ve written in the past and called for the renaming of the streets commemorating the traders like plantation owner Andrew Buchanan, after whom the street is named. So good on the anti-racism campaigners who did just that, pinning up alternative names.

But it has to go further. There has to be restorative justice. Glasgow University, a place not renowned for radicalism, has committed to pay £20 million in reparations to atone for its historical links to slavery, setting up a research centre with the University of the West Indies. The city needs to do more, rather than just say sorry.

And Edinburgh? Nicola Sturgeon could start by renaming Bute House, which is steeped in the profits of slavery. Indeed, she could lead a campaign to pay for what we plundered.

Taking down statues isn’t just window dressing, it’s a declaration that those we are meant to venerate, looking down from their perches, we despise and will no longer tolerate. Although I accept that agreeing criteria for removal is probably impossible.

There’s a statue of Charlie Chaplin in London’s Leicester Square, or at least there was at the time of writing. Chaplin was a comic genius, but he bedded a succession of underage girls, including Lita Grey, at 15, whom he later hastily married in Mexico, probably to escape prosecution. That’s paedophilia. Should he end up in the Thames?

Pass me the Semtex

One monument which should be turned into aggregate is the Jim Crow stone at Hunters Quay in Dunoon. It’s named after the segregation laws in the States, and may well have been coined by racist white American sailors when the Holy Loch was a US nuclear submarine base. The stone is repeatedly painted, cleaned and repainted with what’s meant to look like a black face. Crivvens it looks more like a pregnant shark than a human. What is wrong with these people? There’s a petition out to remove it. Too woke. It needs attacked by a posse wielding jack hammers or atomised in some safe Semtex solution.

Book in

I HAVEN’T managed to learn Greek or play the cello in lockdown but I have done a lot of reading and too much TV. One utterly remarkable book, from someone I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of, but who deserves to be ranked as a giant in American literature, is A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley. Kelley, a black man, wrote the book in 1962 when he was 23 and it couldn’t be more germane to why black lives matter.

It’s 1957 in the deep South, a young black former throws salt on his field, shoots his horse and livestock, sets fire to his house and leaves the state. The entire African-American population, in their ones and tens, leave after him. What is stunning about the book, apart from the evocative prose, is that it’s all from the standpoint of the whites of the town, in their voices. I’m not sure anyone did that before. Kelley was not prolific, he died in 2017, but this book stands as a monument no statue could ever do justice to.

On the money

I DON’T know if you can make bets on who will be awarded baubles in the honours list but if you can then my money’s on James Anderson, the man who has given £3.1 million to Scottish football clubs and who is promising more. He is a shoo-in for a serious honour like a knighthood. And his act of benevolence may also have the unintended consequence of saving his team, Hearts, from relegation, although I doubt it.

Surgical strike

Tuned into a TV drama called Hannibal which is about a husky-voiced Canadian detective who has a bipolar wife and a sassy female partner (the old will they, won’t they line). A woman is shot in the head in the woods, apparently left for dead, but wakes not knowing who she is and with a bullet lodged in the brain. She is taken to neurosurgery in Toronto where she is operated on – under anaesthetic one hopes – but conscious throughout, singing House Of The Rising Sun as they remove the slug from her heid. Sound ridiculous? Apparently not. It’s called awake surgery and patients are given tasks to perform, like playing the guitar or violin, so they aren’t disturbing crucial brain functions as doctors work. I don’t know if this extends to pottery, but one woman in Rome made 90 Ascoli olives, the recipe for which is to stuff meat into the flesh of olives, coat in breadcrumbs and fry. If it had gone on longer perhaps she’d have made a bolognese? They stopped her short of the coating and frying, to avoid making a mess and setting off the fire alarms.

If she has to have follow-up surgery on her tumour they’re going to ask her to prepare steak tartare and they’ll do the op over lunch.